Xi Jinping is cutting off one of the main paths to power in China

Members
of the Communist Youth League attend a ceremony in front of
Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Tiananmen Square May 4,
1998Reuters

Unlike many of his peers in the Communist Party leadership,
President Xi Jinping did not join the Communist Youth
League (CYL), which is a traditional path to political power in
the country.

Now it seems that path may be getting cut off.

Bloomberg reports that the Communist Party is considering
ending undergraduate admissions into the League's University of
Political Science, which was founded back in 1985 when former
President Hu Jintao attended.

Such a move would send a message to younger people about an
organization that’s been a traditional springboard for leadership
posts but was not the route to power for Xi. It could reverberate
through a twice-a-decade reshuffle at next year’s party congress,
when several prominent league alumni will be in the running for
positions in the party’s uppermost echelons.

The news that the CYL might discontinue this program was
initially met with a little bit of resistance. One instructor
wrote a post about the decision on Weibo and said that it was
perhaps a bit too hasty. That was on Thursday, but it had already
been taken down by Friday, when the university put out a
statement saying that it was looking at "reform" options,
according to Bloomberg.

Experts say that you can expect more cuts to CYL
programming and more "reforms" coming for the organization in
general. You can also expect to see fewer CYL members ascending
the ranks of politics. This was an organization for China's elite
— for princelings — and Xi was not a part of that growing
up.

In fact, you may recall that everything we know about Xi's
childhood is pretty terrifying. The party turned against his
family early in his life during the Cultural Revolution, and his
father was put in a work camp. This has colored Xi's entire view
of politics, as he told theChinese
Times back in 2000:

"People who have little experience with power, those who
have been far away from it, tend to regard these things as
mysterious and novel," Xi said.

"But I look past the superficial things: the power and the
flowers and the glory and the applause. I see the detention
houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand
politics on a deeper level.”